Why? Oh, well - I thought you'd be rather an attractive person to marry. That's all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can't tell you why. There's no rule about it, you know.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

Every great man has a woman behind him ... And every great woman has some man or other in front of her, tripping her up.